This is an incredible Gulag memoir, the first I have read written by a woman. She offers a very different picture not of the camps or the suffering, that remains the same, but the women's response to the conditions and the suffering. I am reminded of what Anne Applebaum wrote in Gulag:
"[Women] formed powerful friendships, and helped one another in ways that male prisoners did not." Pg. 308
"Why was this? Perhaps because waiting for an inevitable disaster is worse than the disaster itself, or because physical pain dulls mental anguish. Or perhaps simply because human beings can get used to anything, even to the most appalling evils, so that the successive wounds inflicted on me by the dreadful system of baiting, inquisition and torture hurt me less than those I suffered when I first came up against it. Be that as it may, 1945 was a frightful year for me. My nerves were at a breaking point, and I had persistent thoughts of suicide." Pg. 16
"It was he who first explained to me the theory which became popular in 1937, that 'when you get down to it, there is no difference between 'subjective' and 'objective.'' Whether you had committed a crime or, out of inadvertence or lack of vigilance, 'added grist' to the criminal's mill, you were equally guilty. Even if you had not the slightest idea of what was going on, it was the same." Pg.33
"'Sit down if you are tired,' he grunted contemptuously. His face was contorted by the same expression - a mixture of hatred, scorn, and mockery - which I was to see hundreds of times on the faces of his fellow apparatchiks and of heads of prisons and camps.
I learned later that this grimace was part of the interrogators' stock in trade and that they were made to practice it before a looking glass. But seeing it for the first time, I felt sure that it expressed Vevers's own attitude to me personally." Pg 49
"There is nothing more frightening than prison insomnia." Pg. 97
"Later on I was able to establish a general principle: the dirtier the prison, the worse the food, the ruder and more undisciplined the guards, the less danger there was to life. The cleaner the jail, the more we got to eat, the more courteous the jailers, the closer we were to death." Pg 103-4
"As I lay awake on my plank bed, the most unorthodox thoughts passed through my mind - about how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance, and also how relative are all human systems and ideologies and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another." Pg. 113
"The sun shone dimly through the frosted glass; there were thirty five collapsible beds, all tidily made, but the main thing was - did my eyes deceive me? No, there were actually books on each one. I trembled with delight. My beloved, inseparable companions whom I had not seen for six months past - six months without leafing through your pages, without smelling the acrid printer's ink!" Pg. 152
"'The indictment stretched, mile on mile,
Pit-shafts mark our weary way.
We greet our sentence with a smile -
It's penal servitude! What bliss!'
Suddenly these words thrilled me with their aptness. It is only at such times that one realizes the true value of poetry, and one's heart fills with tender gratitude toward the writer. How could Pasternak have known so exactly what one felt, living in his 'melancholy Moscow home'? I remembered other lines: 'The rest were drunk with space, and spring, and penal servitude. . . '
If only he could know how much his poem helped me to endure, and to make sense of prison, of my sentence, of the murderers with frozen codfish eyes." Pg. 176
"There are no words to describe the feelings of a prisoner who for two years has seen no one but warders and suddenly comes face to face with fellow sufferers. So these were my dear friends whom I had thought I should never see! What a joy to be with them, to be able to love and help them!" Pg. 264
"By innocently calling her 'comrade' I had reminded her of the past which she had cast out of her mind because it stood in the way of her present career: hence the outburst with which she answered me. After the incident I started to reflect on the psychological type created by camp conditions, and whenever I met Tamara afterwards I was reminded of Blok's lines:
'How terrible to be a corpse among the living,
Pretending to be alive and full of feeling!
But why pretend? To be accepted by society,
One needs only to conceal the rattling of one's bones.'
In later years, in the camps, I men many of these spiritually dead people. In prison there were none. Prison, and especially solitary confinement, ennobled and purified human beings, bringing to the surface their finest qualities, however deeply hidden." Pg. 341
"Although one might have thought the men were stronger than we were, they seemed somehow more defenseless and we all felt a maternal pity for them. They stood up to pain so badly - this was every woman's opinion - and they would not know how to mend anything or be able to wash their clothes on the sly as we could with our light things . . . Above all, they were our husbands and brothers, deprived of our care in this terrible place. As someone expressed it, quoting from one of Ehrenburg's early novels, 'The poor dears have no one to sew their buttons on for them.'" Pg. 345
Book 69
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